LRB Collections 5: ‘Sinomania’

‘What a European Old China Hand said had to be listened to carefully for the bits absurd enough to be repeated.’ – William Empson

China, as the writer Zha Jianying once put it, ‘is way too big a cow for anyone to tackle in full’. People say first-tier and fourth-tier cities in China are like different planets. Sometimes a person might feel foreign in her own country, Sheng Yun writes in her introduction, confronted by so many things that go beyond her wildest imagination. This collection’s panoramic take on modern China is comprised of divergent close-ups: from Beijing to Tibet, from bandits in Mengtze to Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution, from the suicide of a famous poet to the death by drinking of a government official.